Cosmic Information Theory and Analysis

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The production, transport, measurement and meaning of Cosmic Information in theory and with data will be a major theme in 2012-17. Over three decades my group has shown with ever increasing precision that cosmic observables - mostly from CMB experiments we were/are directly involved in - provide key information on structure formation, and the parameters that define it, such as the baryon, dark matter and dark energy (DE) densities, average curvature, size, and those for primordial inflation fluctuations generated, including power spectrum amplitudes and shapes and possible non-Gaussianity. With large scale structure (LSS), supernova and CMB data, we determine allowed physically-motivated trajectories of the dark energy equation of state (DE EOS). We are a critical analysis node of CMB teams, currently immersed in data from the satellite Planck, the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) and the Cosmic Background Imager (CBI2); in the immediate past from Boomerang, CBIpol, Acbar and WMAP; in 12-17 from WMAP9, ACTpol, ABS, Spider, GBT, Quiet-90 and Planck. By developing/applying theoretical computations of all types and sophisticated statistical tools, we have determined well in 06-11 the CMB temperature and E-polarization power spectra, and will do so exquisitely in 12-17. Many long-term theoretical and phenomenological projects underway to interpret the data avalanche include: the thermal and kinetic CMB Sunyaev-Zeldovich effects, using large hydrodynamical simulations of the cosmic web with energy-feedback; CMB gravitational lensing; extragalactic radio sources and sub-mm sources ( Cosmic Infrared Background); Galactic foregrounds (e.g., polarized dust emission via novel statistical measures of MHD turbulence). A 12-17 target is CMB B-mode polarization to detect inflation-generated gravitational waves or set theory-killing upper limits. Related fundamental physics projects will develop/apply our trajectory methods for inflation-acceleration, the DE EOS and ionization fraction and our non-Gaussian forms from modulated post-inflation-preheating shocks-in-time to the full emerging CMB+LSS data, conditioned by theoretical priors, e.g., motivated by a string landscape.